A week ago, the US election looked to be over. Hillary Clinton was riding so high in the polls after a disastrous series of gaffes by Donald Trump that few could conceive of a Republican path to victory on 8 November. Friday’s shock intervention by the FBI may not be enough to change that outcome on its own, but it has certainly set political imaginations running wild.
The worry for Democrats is that fresh inquiries regarding Clinton’s use of a private email server while secretary of state come at a difficult time. Not only is it hard to prove a negative and re-establish her innocence with barely a week to go until the election, but the letter to congressional officials from director James Comey capped a tricky run of news that was already making a sizable dent in her polling lead.
Momentum for Trump began to recover first thanks to another set of emails, the contents of which perhaps explain why the Clintons risked so much to try to retain control of her electronic communications in the first place. Released by WikiLeaks, a factor that US intelligence agencies have blamed on Russian hackers, these emails to and from campaign chairman John Podesta have been trickling out for weeks, with mostly embarrassing rather than damaging content.
That changed on Wednesday with the release of a report that appeared to confirm just how much the Clinton family has blurred the boundaries between its business, charitable and political interests. Though almost all of the new information related to Bill rather than Hillary, it gave Trump supporters fresh ammunition at a moment when they were desperate to shift attention from their candidate’s own scandals over taxes and alleged inappropriate behaviour towards women.
In an election that many pollsters describe as an unpopularity contest, it does not take much to swing the mood of independent voters. By Friday, the combination of no news from Trump and bad news from Clinton had halved her average leadin the polls since the last presidential debate.
“When the attention was on Trump, Clinton was winning. Now, the attention is on Clinton,” said political consultant Frank Luntz, who has predicted the winner in 2016 will be the campaign that keeps the focus on its opponent.
Sunday’s average lead for Clinton in national polls of 3.4% ought still to be a healthy safety margin. Bill Clinton’s lead over George Bush shrank from 11 points to just three in the last two weeks of the 1992 election, yet he won by nearly double that margin.
But among Democrats, a cause for concern – if not yet panic – is that very few polls published so far were carried out after news broke about the FBI and the emails.
One reputable survey that got close, an ABC News-Washington Post tracking pollreleased on Sunday, showed just a one-point overall lead for Clinton. It asked some voters on Friday evening what they thought and found the news had mostly hardened existing opinions but could also play a role at the margins.
“About a third of likely voters say they are less likely to support Clinton given FBI director James Comey’s disclosure,” said pollster Gary Langer. “Given other considerations, 63% say it makes no difference.”
Only 7% of Clinton supporters felt it would make any difference, but this rises “much higher among groups already predisposed not to vote for her”, the poll found.
Read more: The Guardian
Photo source: Jewel Samad/AFP/Getty Images
